Sony has today announced a new digital camera for the American market, the Cyber-shot DSC-P7. Featuring a 1/1.8" 3.2 megapixel CCD imager and a 3x optical zoom lens, the P7 follows the company's tradition of compact cameras that you can take anywhere with you - ensuring you don't experience the problem of a camera that gets left at home and misses the spontaneous photo you weren't expecting. Other features include 3-point autofocus, movie and "clip motion" functions, USB connectivity, Sony's long-life batteries and of course Memory Stick storage. Pricing and availability haven't been announced in the launch material we have; look for the official press release to follow shortly.

Courtesy of Sony, you can find highlights and full specifications below:

Multi-Pattern Measuring Independently light-metering 49 points of the frame, Multi-Pattern measuring establishes the optimum exposure value, even in scenes where highlight and shadow are not centered in the frame.

Pre-Flash Metering With a momentary pre-flash, the camera illuminates the subject and calculates exposure through the lens directly from the CCD. Adjustable flash level and redeye reduction insure great flash shots.

Scene Selection Mode With 3 Scene Modes, camera parameters can be matched to the shooting conditions. Twilight slows the shutter to as long as 2 seconds for available light, Twilight Portrait adds flash to illuminate foreground subjects, and Landscape optimizes distant focus.

Slow Shutter Noise Reduction During long Twilight mode exposures, Slow Shutter NR captures the scene, and then the CCD noise pattern with a dark frame exposure. By subtracting the two, even long exposures can be clear.

Clip Motion Mode Capture up to 10 images and convert them to an animated GIF with 2 frames per second playback. By varying the interval between shots you can create animations not possible with other motion capture modes.

Playback Zoom, Trim and Resize During playback, magnify any portion of the image up to 5x and trim to the area of your interest. Then, save the new image as a new file in any of the image sizes available from the menu.

Rechargeable Infolithium® Battery Provides reliable, long-lasting power for continuous shooting, and avoids the “memory effect” common to other batteries. AC-LS1 adapter/charger provides stable power for USB download.

UPDATED 2002-05-29 02:36ET: Thanks to David Kamanski over at the Digital Eye website for letting us know that there's not going to be a press release on the wires for Sony's new announcements, as these are just extensions of existing camera lines. the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P7 will ship in July at a cost of about $500... Thanks again, David - now get to sleep! :) (We would if we could, but we're still battling through a flood of tonight's work - early AM NDA times, what fun!) ;)Source:
Sony Electronics